Working overseas and missing your mom

cdde2 bag 160120 001

Your first and truest ally

Face it: When things get really difficult at work or when the people you live with prove more challenging than usual, you will normally grab your phone to have even a short talk with your mother. It’s normally just an issue of how much money you have set aside for making calls. Thank goodness for things like Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, and Viber.

When I was still an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) in Singapore, I was one of the musicians in my church. In one Mass for Filipinos, the priest focused on how each and every one of us there owed so much to our mothers. Hit with some inspiration, I began playing the notes of “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan” on the piano. When I glanced at the congregation, hardly any person there, male or female, had dry eyes.

Why does any discussion on mothers cause such a reaction? For starters, a mother is always a person’s first supporter, the first fan. If you think about it, the mother is also the first real friend and chat mate with some mothers talking to their children as early as the pregnancy stage. Many of us have the experience of our mothers knowing something was up even before we knew about it or had the gumption to talk about it.

For example, when I was seven years old, I came home and my mom just looked at me. “May lagnat ka.” I gave this quizzical look and said, “Ha?” True enough, I was running a fever even though I didn’t feel it yet.

That’s how moms are and this is one reason why we can’t hide much from them and why our mothers are normally our first and truest allies.

This is why each OFW will always have this nagging question: How is my my mom? Is she okay?

Remember the times when you were too tired that she carried you?

This question is made stronger every time an OFW comes home only to leave for work again. You just can’t get rid of that feeling that maybe just so you don’t worry about her, your mother is not telling you everything she actually needs.

This is one of the reasons why BeamAndGo came to be. Each OFW wants a good measure of assurance that things are okay back home. You’re like that, aren’t you?

The surprise and the usual

Giving your mother chocolates is a good thing. So is giving her a bag of groceries. Mothers love that their little baby is able to earn a living, live a life independently, and send a goody or two back home one in a while. She won’t tell you though. You just see the twinkle in her eye and perhaps the hastily-brushed-off tear.

With BeamAndGo, you can actually do this much more easily and more frequently. For example, if you send her a BeamAndGo gift certificate of Php 1,000 (approximately SGD 30 or HKD 160), she can easily get perhaps the following items:

  1. Adult milk (600g): Php 270
  2. Sugar-free Coffee (20 packs): Php 106
  3. Crackers (850g): Php 147
  4. Dried Mangoes (100g): Php 50
  5. 5 cups of instant noodles (35g): Php 79
  6. Spaghetti (450g): Php 36
  7. Sweet Spaghetti Sauce (25kg): Php 22
  8. Cooking oil (1L): Php 170
  9. High Fiber bread loaf: Php 90
  10. Cheddar cheese: Php 45
Halina. Bili na!

What’s even better is that BeamAndGo’s partner merchants offer better value than leading supermarkets. These merchants are your “neighborhood” groceries such as Gaisano Mall of Davao (Davao), Gaisano Capital (Cebu), or Iloilo Supermart (Iloilo). Knowing these guys are also on your side can truly give a whole new and meaningful importance to your hard-earned money.

She was your first companion and lakwatsa buddy.

When you miss your mother, maybe, instead of going out with some friends to burn that SGD 30 or HKD 160, you can just go to the BeamAndGo website and send your mom something that she appreciate.

What we have above most likely won’t last a month but think of it as something like your way of giving back to mom for all the times she didn’t have a lot of money but spent it on one slice of 3M Pizza or a Burger Machine cheeseburger and a bottle of Coke just so her little baby could have something to eat after a tiring day in school.

Yes, that’s your mom, nanay, mama, nanang, inay, ima, mudra. Why don’t you give her a call now and tell her something is on the way to make her smile?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply